1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an apparatus for making spring-roll skin, more particularly, to an apparatus which is capable of providing marks on spring-roll skin during the production of the latter.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditionally, spring-rolls are made by hand by preparing dough and contacting the same with pre-heated pans. As soon as the dough is adhered to the pans, the dough is dried and formed into spring-roll skins on the pans. After the skins are removed from the pans with the use of a turner, they are used to wrap stuffing which generally consists of meat and vegetable. Some spring-roll skin makers provide marks or patterns on the skins by using edible coloring materials so as to improve the appearance or to promote sales.
For mass production, it is known in the art to produce spring-roll skin by using a machine which typically includes a forming drum. The forming drum is heated and has a circumferential surface for heating and forming dough into a continuous spring-roll skin on the drum surface. The dough is fed to the heating surface of the drum through a feeder, and the skin formed on the heating surface is removed from the drum by using a scraper and is then conveyed by a conveyer belt to a cutting station for cutting the continuous skin into segmented skin sheets, a spinkling station for sprinkling flour onto the segmented sheets, and a subsequent packaging station. Since such a machine is not provided with any means for printing or marking the skins, manufacturers usually utilize screen printing plates to mark or pattern each spring-roll skin sheet via a manual operation. After marking, the skin sheets are sent to a stuffing device to wrap stuffing, such as chopped meat and/or vegetable.
However, as the spring-roll skin sheets are previously sprinkled with flour at the sprinkling station in order to prevent them from sticking to each other when the skin sheets are stacked, the markings on the surface of the skin sheets are usually faint and unclear. In addition, after the skin sheets are marked, the skin sheets have to be turned over so as to face the marked sides of the skin sheets downward and to place stuffing on the unmarked sides of the skin sheets. Therefore, it is desirable that the skin sheets be marked or printed before the flour sprinkling operation and that the unmarked sides of the skin sheets face upwards after the skin sheets are delivered from the skin forming apparatus to facilitate a subsequent stuffing operation.